Ahmedabad BRTS gets international award

The Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS), long seen by India's urban planners as an answer to traffic chaos in big cities, has turned out to be a headache. Even the national capital has suffered this BRTS ailment. But now the planners who envisioned the mass transport system based on the BRTS model of Columbia can take some heart.

The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has made the BRTS a big success utilising the services of the experts of Ahmedabad-based Centre for Environment Planning and Technology (CEPT) in planning and design.

Last fortnight, AMC Commissioner I.P. Gautam accompanied by CEPT's Shivavand Swamy and AMC's standing panel head Ashit Vora, the troika behind BRTS's success, flew down to Washington to receive the prestigious sustainable transport award for visionary achievement in mass transport from the UN-backed Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

The award followed another award by the centre that found Ahmedabad's BRTS to be the best in India. Superb planning and design that removed the past lacunae of the BRTS in India, excellent quality of work, and above all, a marketing effort that made the people feel that the BRTS was the city's pride helped AMC made it a success.

The BRTS spread in Ahmedabad is over 25 km presently but will touch 90 km in 18 months. For the first three months AMC ran the BRTS free and then based on the commuters' feedback made changes in the design, even changing the design of the bus in the process.

As Gautam puts it: "Apart from the precautions, we took to plug the loopholes and we made the people feel that they owned the system." Clearly, where there is a will there is a way.

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